What’s the point of Sanskrit texts on physical yoga?

Webinar Description:
In this talk Professor Mallinson shall look at a corpus of a dozen Sanskrit texts which were written between the 11th and 15th centuries CE. These are the first manuals on physical yoga and our earliest evidence for its practices.  In this talk, the speaker will give an overview of the corpus and draw attention to some surprising features, such as its remarkable intertextuality, some texts’ injunctions to shun women when we know that there were female practitioners of yoga during this period, the inadequacy of the texts’ teachings for carrying out the practices described, and the claims that mastery of some of the practices allows the yogi to flout the rules usually prescribed for yoga. Drawing on these features and other evidence from the period, the speaker will propose that the texts were the products of a wide range of newly flourishing monastic institutions.
 

Speaker’s biography:  
James Mallinson is Boden Professor of Sanskrit at the University of Oxford. His research focuses on the history of yoga and its practitioners. As well as text-critical study of Sanskrit texts his methods include the study of art-historical materials and fieldwork among yogi traditions in India today. His publications include an online critical edition of the Haṭhapradīpikā (hathapradipika.online, 2024, as part of a UK-German project team) The Amṛtasiddhi and Amṛtasiddhimūla: the Earliest Texts of the Haṭhayoga Tradition (EFEO 2021, with Péter-Dániel Szántó) and Roots of Yoga (Penguin Classics 2017, with Mark Singleton).